I'm Lindsay Ferrier, a Nashville writer with a passion for family travel, exploring Tennessee, and raising kids without losing my mind in the process. This is where I share my discoveries, along with occasional deep thoughts, pop culture tangents and a sprinkling of snark. Want to get in touch? Use the CONTACT form at the top of the page.
July 13, 2008
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I live in a very tiny subdivision, where the wee streetlets and mini-cul-de-sacs can be comfortably walked start to finish in under 30 minutes. (It was my pregnancy workout, if you must know, and continues to be one of the many ways I sneak in “talk time” with Hubs.) I actually know many of my neighbors, some quite well, and probably owe this familiarity to my neighborhood’s small size. But of course, there are also downsides to living in a subdivisionette.
Five of them, to be exact.
They are boys, preteen boys, and they do boy things, which most often means making liberal use of a skateboard ramp and basketball goal they’ve set up on one street’s dead end, or touring the neighborhood in a pack on their bikes. That part is fine. I have no gripe with boys who actually still play outside and interact with each other, as opposed to sitting for hours in front of a television screen playing Halo or World of Warcraft or something equally soul-draining.
The problem is that the activities of our neighborhood’s boys also tend to veer into the profoundly irritating. For example, we have a modest community playground that includes three swings. Two of the swings were broken almost immediately after being installed, the curved bars that held the rubbery seats in place pulled out and bent in two in what appears to have been some hormonal preteen display of “strength.” In most neighborhoods, literally dozens of people could have been responsible- In ours, well, there aren’t many other places to look for culprits beyond our local brat pack. And in the meantime, I can’t swing in my own neighborhood beside my daughter. And that sucks.
You want another example? A few weeks ago, a loud noise after dark rattled my windowpanes and made me jump up to make sure all was safe in the house. My older girls, who were taking a walk outside, of course heard the noise and were in place to see two of our friendly neighborhood boys running for dear life from the spot where the noise came from. I didn’t care to find out what exactly they detonated to make such a sound, but, you know, NOT GOOD.
Pretty much every week in the summer time, a stupid prank is pulled in the neighborhood, or a surface is defaced, or a sign is stolen. Talk to anyone and they’ll tell you they have one good guess as to who is responsible– and yet nothing’s ever done. I want to be indulgent, but the joke got old about two years ago.
And so of course when a road crew dug a pit right outside our neighborhood and set up a dozen safety cones around it before leaving for the day, I knew as soon as I saw them that they wouldn’t make it through the night untouched. Sure enough, when I left this morning, the cones all had been placed strategically along the walls of our subdivision’s entryway. Oh ha ha, boys. CLEVER.
And then I paused, realizing as I stared at those cones that I was mumbling insults aloud. The thought made me cringe. Worse than defacing my pretty little piece of the American Dream, those boys have turned me into a scowling curmudgeon, a modern day Mr., er, Mrs. Wilson to a passel of Dennis the Menaces. They are making me old. And I loathe them for it.
This post originally appeared on Parents.com.
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